U.S. Backs Net Privacy Method

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U.S. Backs Net Privacy Method

WASHINGTON – The White House has endorsed a major Internet industry initiative aimed at boosting online privacy by redesigning the way browsing software handles personal data.

After years in development, on Wednesday in New York the new standard underwent its first public test of how similarly engineered software applications would work together.

Industry leaders like Microsoft and America Online's Netscape have pledged to rebuild their Web browsers to support the new architecture, called P3P, short for Platform for Privacy Preferences.

The standards were developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, a global group drawn from industry, the academic community, privacy groups and public policy organizations.

P3P is designed to provide an automated way to compare consumers' privacy preferences with the privacy practices of the websites they visit. It lets websites express their privacy practices in a format that can be retrieved automatically and interpreted easily.

On Wednesday, the White House welcomed the industry approach as an example of the kind of private-sector leadership it hopes will make legislation in this area unnecessary.

"Today, the White House is pleased to advance these goals by supporting an initiative that harnesses technology to protect privacy on the Internet," President Clinton's spokesman, Joe Lockhart, said in a statement.

The home page of the White House website will be among the first locations demonstrating the new P3P standard, along with that of the Department of Commerce and 35 or so other public and private-sector sites.

Microsoft, whose Windows operating system is the face of computing to most users, said Wednesday that its next version of Windows will include privacy-enabling technologies based on the P3P specification.

Microsoft (MSFT) support for P3P is expected to be available next year with the next major version of Windows, code-named "Whistler," which will include Microsoft Internet Explorer browser software.

Legal remedies that might alter Microsoft's relation to its browser have been suspended pending the outcome of an appeal in its anti-trust case. The proceedings could last for months or years.

Among those announcing that their websites or parts of them were now P3P-compliant were America Online, AT&T, Engage Technologies, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Proctor and Gamble and the White House. The P3P technical protocols were released in November 1999 so the technology could be incorporated into websites and other applications.

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web in the early 1990s as a way of graphically depicting information delivered over the Internet, is director of the consortium, which coordinates standards for Web-technology development globally.

The agreement on a privacy protocol seeks to redress historically weak privacy protections built into earlier generations of the Web, designed for open information-sharing by academics without much thought for commercial uses.

The new industry standards promises to plug holes in the basic design of Internet software to allow consumers to make informed decisions on how and when their personal information is released over the Web.

The technical standards agreed to by the consortium would put in place new ground rules for how Internet salesmen market products and services.

But the plan is not universally supported in the industry. Online consumer advocates and an emerging class of companies that specialize in protecting consumer privacy criticized the P3P plan as too little too late for consumers.

"Instead of responding to the growing demand for consumer privacy, by its very design, P3P seems more intent on satisfying websites' insatiable hunger for personal information," he said in a statement.